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[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/xd25o72.jpg[/IMG]

[B]Prologue:
Snowbound[/b]

[I]"You don't start over. That's what it's about. Every step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it."[/I]
-- Cormac McCarthy [/CENTER]


[B]Colorado Territory
January, 1873[/B]


The four riders kept their horses in a straight line up the mountain pass. They kept their nags at a steady and brisk pace in order to cover as much ground as possible before it was too late. Although it was just after three in the afternoon gray clouds hung heavy in the sky, obscuring the sun behind them and making the chilly afternoon dip even lower. The clouds were snow clouds. A blizzard was on its way and they had to get to their destination.

Riding at the head of the four-man convoy was John Karnow. That wasn't his real name, just the name he was using in Colorado. Karnow and his gang were headed for a cabin near the mountain top. It wasn't stocked with much, which was why their saddlebags were loaded down with provisions to make it through until the spring. Karnow's saddle bags had more than canned food and salted pork in it. In two bags on both sides of the horse and one wrapped around the horn of his saddle were gold and greenbacks, the gang's hard-earned spoils after a robbery spree through Nebraska and Wyoming in the fall.

"We're almost there!" Karnow shouted back to his men. "Keep movin'! We gotta get there before the snow does!"

As if on cue, the first flurries of snow began to fall from the sky. Within a few minutes, a steady snowfall began to cover the ground. Karnow cursed and spurred his horse onwards up the pass. The behind him did likewise, one whipping the side of his horse with his reins.

"How much further?!" Joe McGruder yelled up at Karnow. "I can barely see in front of my face, Jimmy!"

"Just a bit further, dammit!" said Karnow. "Get yet goddamn horse movin' and we'll be there!"

While the band of outlaws continued their rapidly slowing journey through the pass, a voyeur watched from above. He was nestled in a hiding spot of foliage and snow scarcely a hundred yards away from Karnow and his gang. The watcher had been here for twelve hours, toughing out the cold and waiting for his quarry to arrive. For five months now the watcher traveled in the wake of Karnow's gang. He tracked them across Nebraska and Southern Wyoming and saw the destruction they had wrought first hand, from the bank teller with his throat slit in Lincoln to the burned down houses in Cheyenne. As the days grew shorter and the cold started coming in, the watcher made a gamble and headed to Colorado while the gang caused mayhem in Casper. 

A man from Louisiana, a Cajun who knew Karnow as one John David Ferguson, told the watcher about the cabin in the Rockies. It was where he and Ferguson and three others went back in '69 after dynamiting a mail train in Utah, and then in '71 when they went on a spree through New Mexico and killed a half dozen souls. Anytime it got cold, Ferguson headed there to wait out the winter and hibernate. The Cajun told the watcher all this with tears in his eyes just before a Nebraska hangman tied the noose around his neck. He begged for clemency and promised he would show the watcher where the cabin was if he could be set free. The watcher's scarred face was as hard as stone as he shook his head and condemned the man to whatever waited for him in the next life.

From his hiding perch, the watcher clung tightly to the Spencer rifle in his glove-covered hands. Richard Adams, the slow-witted Arkansan with a penchant for raping female bank tellers, had trouble keeping up with the pack thanks to the increasing snowfall and a stubborn horse. The watcher had his first target. 

The rifle cracked once. Adams' horse raised up and threw him to the ground. Adams coughed blood and held hard to the gaping wound in his chest while the panicked animal took off down the mountain in a frenzy. The three others looked around in confusion as the watcher worked the Spencer's action and loaded another round. Another rifle shot went into the side of Joe McGruder's head and exited out the other side, taking what little brains he had with it. He was dead before his carcass landed in the snow. 

By now, Ferguson and his one remaining man had their guns out and were looking for the watcher. The heavy snow made it almost impossible for them to see his hunter's blind. The Spencer kicked as the watcher blew Chris McCall off his horse. The horses of the two dead men were panicking and Ferguson could barely control his own nag.

"WHERE EVER YOU ARE, YOU GODDAMN BUSHWACKER, YOU COME OUT AND FACE ME RIGHT NOW!"

With the confusion and violence of the last few seconds, Ferguson had lost where he was on the mountain. At the start of the ambush, the watcher was a hundred yards away. Now Ferguson was on top of him, far too close for the Spencer, but close enough for the big gun.

"Where are you?!"

"Right here, Ferguson."

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/cEKIdbj.jpg[/IMG]

"Draw, you bastard!"

The watcher rose from his hidden vantage point, snow and leaves falling off of him as he came out with the revolver aimed squarely at Ferguson's heart. He needed to keep the face intact. He was worth the same amount dead as alive, but that wouldn't be worth much if the watcher turned Ferguson's face into pulp.

Ferguson let out a surprised gasp at the sight of his face, a gasp that became a gurgle as the watcher put three shots into his chest, a tight grouping that made Ferguson's heart explode and killed him before he could raise his gun.

Slumping off his spooked horse, John Ferguson sprawled on the snowy ground and breathed his last breath as Jonah Hex stomped away to finally take the piss he had been holding in for hours.


[center][B][H3]Last Killer Standing[/h3][/b]
[B]A Jonah Hex Yarn[/B][/center]